They give me a starter Pokémon. It's red and white and has little star patterns around the gills that ooze milky bubbles when it cries. It's gross and I love it. I bring it around everywhere. I give it a name; I call it Stinky. I am not an imaginative person.

Stinky comes at level 5 and is dual Blood and Pus type. The colours reflect its humours. The local professor (they have hired one for every neighbourhood, handing them out at the community centre) tells me that there are seventeen humours in all, but they recently discovered a new one in 2019. I ask him what it is. He says it's a secret, like the fifth Japanese flavour nobody knew about until some institutionally-accredited scientist decided to tickle some seaweed. Stinky grovels at my feet nibbling at the bits of my curry puff that fall to the ground.

Everybody gets a starter Pokémon. It's not really that complicated. Overnight the streets are dabbled with various yellow, brown, red, white, sticky, crunchy, textures as everybody takes their new boy or girl for a walk. Battles are shameless and fleeting affairs. They smear the void decks and carparks and stairwells. Nobody bothers to clean up. In a single effusive day everybody's fluids are on display. The colours mix and melt with each other under the tropical sun. I get very good at battling; I am very good at remembering things; I always remember that Blood is super effective against Piss and not very effective against Cum. Stinky uses Blood Gun and knocks out a bright yellow octopus-shaped Pokémon with a hand for a face. Stinky uses Blood Gun and knocks out a gollywog doll in stripper heels. The churches preach against this, they say it's devil worship, but I think that's not quite right because when we fight it's disgusting, we're all disgusting, we splash and splatter onto each other and in the heat of trauma new friendships are formed. I add my new friends into a private Telegram chat where we schedule new fights every night of the full moon.

Eventually some of the Pokémon start knocking out other Pokémon and our Pokémon start to level up. They morph into lurid new forms, growing new tentacles and attachments and things. Some of them get bigger. Some of them fly. As they grow they learn moves of different types and their new forms start to reflect more nuanced flavours of hurt. Shit and Piss make Pride. Piss and Spit make Getting Mad on the Internet. Cum and Spit make Down Bad. The possibilities are endless. Stinky takes on the shape of a giant manta ray-equivalent and learns some Lymph-type moves, which the local professor suggests are signs of my avarice morphing into wrath. He's basically saying I want too much. I have a notes file on my iPhone documenting the various types of personality disorders and the ways they manifest as recombinations of fluids, so I look up the professor's Piss/Bone Marrow bunny rabbit thing and I find that he's a recovering alcoholic with an uncomfortable obsession with reading about autoimmune disorders his kid could be diagnosed with. A very relatable middle-aged kind of disaster. He recommends I lay off Pokémon for a few weeks while I work out the source of my want.

I get really into bodyweight training all of a sudden. That's the desire speaking, maybe. These Pocket Monsters have turned out to be a really useful diagnostic tool but we're culturally reaching a point where it's fashionable not to wear our hearts on our sleeves, or on reinforced leashes walking and flying and swimming on the street. Stinky watches me as I do pushups and burpees and make my shoulders big and buff with repeated pull-ups on my bedroom door. I wonder how its moveset is shifting in response to me. Is the tip of its tail the beginning of a Swole Strike, the fabled 80 base power Creatine-type move? Or is the physical manifestation of my wants just going to become bloodier and bloodier with time? Already I miss the thrill of smashing our traumas against each other to grow up. The neighbour's kid was 12 years old when he started and now he's 12 years old forever but with a crippling addiction to microtransactions (Puke and Cum and Cerebrospinal Fluid). In our battles his sewer-green monkey would bash its head against Stinky until both Pokémon gave up in despair. On my fifteenth rep Stinky's tail explodes into red.

The Pokémon Centre (a former government clinic) diagnoses my Pokémon for a small fee. The wait takes hours but it's worth it. Within minutes of drinking a dark-coloured liquid my Pokémon's tail is back in no time. The nurse says violence is never the answer to self-improvement, to which I respond that working out is not a form of violence, to which she shrugs: "Maybe it is? Games are more fun when you dominate other people and it's not really any different when you dominate yourself. The history of relationality can't just be a struggle." It makes sense, I guess. Stinky looks up at me with sad eyes. All this while we've been trying to affect each other so hard we forget that we also affect ourselves. I think about my parents whom I've isolated with all the nonstop battling and I feel sad. I tell Stinky: "We need to move somewhere far away."

A bunch of us have the same idea. Some of them are from the battling Telegram chat. We're tired of this emotional rat race. Calmly and softly (with our Pokémon in our Pokeballs) we book a flight to a remote place in Indonesia where we can settle down and work out our differences with words. But after a certain aerial security incident we are forced to camp out by the beach instead. Our local professor (who has grown older) joins us with Pokéblocks and barbecue. Now wiser and more mellow we reconsider our life choices and try to get each other to tell us stories. It helps to break down our experiences into legible trajectories that don't require a combative framework but it's frustratingly inefficient. "Conflict is not abuse," someone says. Some people start angrily walking out. It is at this point where the professor speaks up and reveals the undiscovered, eighteenth type. I ask him what it is. Stinky quivers with anticipation.

"It's tears," he says. "The only type weak against itself is tears."